Blindness by Henry Green
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Cheerio to All That

Blindness might be a parody of English upper class manners and speech from the 1920’s, except that Henry Green, even in this his first novel, knew how to capture exactly what he saw and heard. Life among the chaps at Eton, all frightfully boring and dull except for Seymour and B.G. with whom one could banter in witty epithets and aphorisms. The only real challenge there was to avoid games, and the housemasters when cutting up in town.

Worst luck going blind don’t you know. Sets a person back a bit. Very important not to let the side down though. So much for the literary after-life (that uncertain period after Eton). It would be fun seeing again but hey ho, as Momma says, we could be poor. Fortunately old Nanny is still around to tend to her charge. No different really from when he was a baby. Easier actually since he’s much less mobile now. This is also fortunate because so is Nanny. So with the nurse, the maids, the cook, William the valet, and various other staff, she can just about cope.

The depressing thing is that the affairs in the house are not all that bright. Taxes you know. Country on the way down. The war had to be paid for after all, one supposes. Momma was alone with all the domestic administration. The motor has to go, and the chauffeur. And one is still expected to respond to these endless charity requests. What with one of the under-butler engaged in a dalliance with cook, there’s hardly time for running with the hounds much less a decent shooting party.

And on and on it goes: a chronicle of class disintegration, national transformation and youthful development. Blindness is probably better sociology than it is literature, a document of the time and place produced by someone who was an eye-witness. It shows where Green might be headed but he certainly hadn’t yet arrived. He just hadn’t seen or heard enough at Eton and Oxford.

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